Terrorist Act in Vitez Gone Unpunished for 22 Years

The courts have not yet determined who gave the order to have a truck laden with explosives travel to the old town of Vitez, with the driver tied to the wheel. The driver, a prisoner of the Croatian Defense Council, died as a result of the explosion.

Members of the Army of Bosnia and Herzegovina tried to stop the driver of the truck by shooting at him.

“I fired the whole frame of bullets at the windshield. I looked the man in the eye and I only saw his eyes, because he had helmet on his head and a bulletproof vest, and his hands were on the wheel. I felt as he wanted to say something to me. However, only his eyes were speaking,” recalls Ibrahim Abdic.

As the truck approached Stari Vitez, where civilians were located, Almir Beso, 17 at the time, was inside his home with a friend and his cousin, who had complained of a headache. Beso went to his home to get a pill for his headache. When he came out, he said he didn’t hear the explosion, although it only happened 50 meters away, nor did he see the truck. He only heard a“terrible noise.”

“I heard how pieces of tile and glass fell, debris, and rubble…In that moment, I looked towards my house. I saw that there were no tiles, carpentry..It looked as if you’d taken a model of a city and blown it away. Like Hiroshima. Only the walls left,” Beso says.

At the time of the explosion, Aldin Grizovic, who was 9 at the time, was in a basement shelter.

“There were about twenty civilians, women and children. I don’t remember the explosion that much – it was more like the wave. It threw away all of us in the basement, windows were broken, and the doorposts were blown out. Debris was falling everywhere. A minute after the explosion, everything fell down,” recalled Grizovic, who said they were felt fear and panic as a result of the explosion.

He said that he had a feeling that all of Vitez had been blown into the air.

Carnage After Vitez Explosion

When the truck, which was carrying 500 tonnes of explosives, exploded, Haris Cicvara was upstairs at home with his cousin. Suddenly, he said something fell on top of them.

“I felt like they were stamping on me , for three or four hours, looking for us. Can you imagine I could only move this little finger and a ray of light came to me? I couldn’t turn my head, my eye was closed and my head was all unkempt,” says Cicvara, 21 years old at the time.

Out of fear, Samir Sejdic ran out onto the main street, not knowing what was going on. He said he saw human body parts strewn around the explosion site.

“Nothing looked like the way it was before. Terrible,”Sejdic said.

After the explosion, Almir Beso said he remembered that he went to get his cousin a pill for a headache.

“I climbed the stairs from the back side of the house. They were broken, but somehow I managed to get upstairs. My cousin managed to crawl to the place where a window used to be. She could not stand up on her feet because a piece of concrete and bricks were pressing on the lower part of her body. I heard later that they were alive a few minutes before the explosion, their cry for help could be heard,” Beso said.

He said afterwards, he didn’t remember anything until the UNPROFOR came to investigate.

They started to take away women and children. The cleaning of the site and the extraction of the buried bodies after the explosion of the cistern lasted for five days. Those injured were taken to a hospital in Travnik, while five neighbors, including the driver of the truck, were buried in a nearby cemetery.

Driver was Detention Camp Prisoner

It was later determined that the driver of the cistern was Mujo Sahman. Before he volunteered to drive the truck, he was a prisoner in a nearby detention camp. He thought that driving the truck would rescue him from the detention camp, but it led him to his death instead.

Dario Kordic, Mario Cerkez and Tihomir Blaskic, former members of the Croatian Defense Council, were on trial before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for the explosion that took place in Vitez. However, no one has been convicted yet.

“On April 18, a truck-bomb exploded near a mosque in Stari Vitez. On that occasion, at least six persons were murdered and 50 persons were injured. The Trial Chamber concludes that it was purely an act of terrorism committed by elements of Vitez’s HVO (Croatian Defense Council), but there is no evidence upon which the indictees could be connected to this action,” said judge Richard George May, explaining one of the verdicts.

No one has been charged before the Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina for the explosion of the truck.